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Will deliver more processing power due via Intel's Xeon E5 processor

Amazon has announced the availability of its Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) I2 instances on its web services platform.

The storage-optimised high I/O instances, which are based on solid-state disk (SSD) technology, provide customers with higher random I/O performance and are touted to deliver more processing power due to the integration of Intel's Ivy Bridge EP processor, the Xeon E5-2670 v2.

"[The I2 instances] provide enhanced networking with lower latency, low jitter and very high packet-per-second performance, and are capable of delivering more than 365,000 random read input/output operations per second (IOPS) and more than 315,000 random write IOPS across eight 800GB SSD instance storage volumes," Amazon explained.

"With these capabilities, I2 instances are well suited for transactional systems, high-performance NoSQL databases like Cassandra and MongoDB, and other applications that benefit from very high disk I/O performance."

The firm said the update comes as customers were demanding more high I/O performance, but also wanted smaller instance size options for their smaller database fleets.